


The Things You Live With

by Azzandra



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Body Horror, Bugs & Insects, Everyone In The Whole World is Traumatized, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Optimism, POV Second Person, Post-Apocalypse, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Probably going to be jossed, Trypophobia Warning, Weirdness, happy-ish ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-28
Updated: 2020-06-28
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:20:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24965131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azzandra/pseuds/Azzandra
Summary: The horror has ended. The apocalypse is undone. But the world will never return to how it was before.Testimonies of survivors, regarding life in the aftermath of the apocalypse.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 38





	1. Hive and Seek

You move to a new neighborhood.

It's a quiet place, and the people here are friendly, in that distant, shell-shocked way that people these days can muster friendliness anymore. There is no garden, but there is space for one, and there is an acacia tree grown crooked along the side of the house, leaning in protectively so its branches sweep the roof when the wind blows. You could be happy here.

So when the knock at the door comes, you are excited to meet the neighbors. You weave your way through too few boxes, left haphazardly across the floor, and you do not notice the buzzing until you have already opened the door.

Your neighbor stands on your doorstep in a beekeeper's hat, diaphanous material cascading over the wide brim of the hat like some rendition of a ghost costume. The material is white--not the white of shrouds but that of clean linen--and it obscures the details of your neighbor's body. But it does not fully obscure--cannot fully hide--the bees crawling in and out of your neighbor's honeycomb face. 

You freeze. It is not an unreasonable response, in this new world, in which no soul has escaped the intimate caress of terror. Some have come out of it molded to worse shapes, and it is not their fault that they should resemble something monstrous, something entirely too reminiscent of the awful things before; none of you are what you were anymore. 

You do not want to be rude. But you want to slam the door shut. So you are frozen.

But there is nothing to feed the fear anymore. There are no hungry things to stoke its flames; those things are gone. If you feel afraid, it is only because your own organs squeeze out the hormones for it, and only because your own reptilian brain shrieks its primordial signals. It recedes naturally. It calms. Your heartbeat levels out.

The neighbor moves, in an agonizingly slow manner that makes you think they do not wish to disturb their swarm too much. They have something in their hand.

"Honey?" they ask, though they have only neat rows of wax hexagons where their lips should be. A bee crawls out, another crawls in. The voice is a papery rasp, given body only by the humming buzz that underlays it.

There is a jar of honey in their hand. It is tied with a blue ribbon. This is a gift.

You reach out just as slowly as your neighbor moved. The bees hang around them like ornaments from invisible strings, hovering in place carefully, like they are mindful of your personal space. None of them touch you, and you do not even brush against your neighbor's hand as you accept the jar.

"Welcome to the neighborhood," your neighbor says, in that flat, inflectionless hum. Each word is pronounced slowly, painstakingly, because there are no lips; there are no eyes; there is no nose. There are, incongruously, a pair of ears.

"Thank you," social obligation forces your lips to utter, when your nerves fail you.

They nod--it is a small nod, but their hat is so wide that the movement is rendered majestic--and then they turn around, slowly, and walk back down the driveway.

* * *

You put the honey in a cupboard.

It is not because it makes you uneasy. Or, to find a different justification, it is not as though you have a cupboard where you hide things that you wish to avoid. If it is out of sight and out of mind, it is only by coincidence; and anyway, it isn't like the tin of cinnamon sticks has offended you either, and it's also there at the back of the cupboard, right alongside the jar of honey.

So you have nearly forgotten it until it's overcast one day, and your throat is sore, and you feel the pounding heat behind your eyes that you know usually precedes a fever. It almost comes as a surprise when you find the honey, and turn the jar over in your hands. The blue ribbon has gone a bit pale with dust. You have seen your neighbor since then, of course. You nod at each other politely, but do not stop to chat. You remember, each time, with a jab of guilt, that you have a jar of honey at home, untouched.

Would it be strange to eat it, you wonder? Like consuming someone's body fluids? But then, honey is made with the body fluids of bees, so it feels a bit hypocritical to reject this particular jar of it on that basis. 

You take a spoon, and put a dollop of the honey into your tea. When you drink it, the heat soothes your throat, and the sweet honey coats the inside of it like a warm bandage. It is not the best honey you have ever had--you would perhaps be alarmed if it were--but it is good honey. It tastes like what you think honey should taste. 

You take another sip.

* * *

Your neighbor stands in a field. There are dandelions growing in this field. They were not here before the Apocalypse, but they grow here now; they are entirely mundane dandelions, not wrought from anyone's flesh, not pulled from anyone's inside. They simply grow, a neutral fact of nature.

Your neighbor smiles. They have no lips with which to do so, but the buzzing inside them turns a warmer pitch, and that means much the same thing.


	2. Time Out

The door appears when your chest is already clenching painfully with panic, so there is no space for caution in you as you turn the handle and step through it.

You know it is not an ordinary door, of course; it was not exactly there before you spotted it from the corner of your eye. But it feels as safe as any place, which is to say not at all, but at least on the other side of it, there is no crowd pressing in on you.

There is nothing much at all, in fact. Without the malignant presence that once fed on the lost and confused, the quiet hallway has something between the sterile bareness of a doctor's waiting room and the fluorescent timelessness of an airport terminal. It is liminal, discouraging anyone from staying through the fact that there is nothing of importance here to stay for.

But this is not the first hallway where you ever felt the relief of escape, and its strangeness makes no difference to you; it is a place where you can curl up on the ground and whimper into the cradle of your elbows until the tears in your throat are spent, and the panic that sank its claws into you has had time to loosen its grip. There is a reassuring indifference to the beige walls, and your cries sound muffled no matter how high-pitched they are as they squeeze past your throat. 

When you are done, wrung dry of tears, pulse coming down from its galloping speed, eyes aching and mouth dry, there is still nobody around you to stare or be inconvenienced by your presence. You spread your legs out before you, toes nearly touching the opposite wall, and you wait for a while longer yet, until the heat of embarrassment is gone from your face as well.

But the more you stay here, the moreyou feel like leaving, and when the overwhelming beigeness of the place starts feeling boring instead of reassuring, you rise to your feet and brush the dust off your clothes. You are calm now. Your head is clear. You have rallied your defenses, and you can step out into the world again.

You step through the same door, and out into a completely unfamiliar place. It is an annoyance, but to be expected; at least the street signs are in the language you expect, although you may be miles away from where you were when you stepped through the door. Maybe the distance is not so bad, though. At the moment, you can't really mind it.

When the door shuts behind you, it is already gone, leaving behind a bare stretch of wall.


	3. Buddy System

There is someone under your floorboards.

It is hard to mistake the shuffling and scraping as anything but motion, because you can feel it through the soles of your feet even when you cannot hear it. For a while, you could dismiss it as some _thing_ instead of some _one_ , but you feel it to be a person.

You feel it in the bones of you, where the creeping chill of loneliness held you for a small eternity. If you hadn't lived through that long winter of the soul, the grey void in which you existed only as something ripped apart from any human contact, maybe you would not have known it so surely now. But after being truly alone, you can now tell, unerringly, when you are not.

And anyway, when you drop to your knees one day, and tap on the floorboards twice-- _knock, knock_ \--the shuffling sounds stop for a moment. It feels like indecision, before the answer comes: _thump thump_. The dull thud of a fist that barely has enough space to move. But an answer, nonetheless.

You could rip the floorboards and confront your uninvited housemate, but you think, maybe, that they are more your safety net than an interloper. You are afraid to be alone--always have been, always will be--but you know your tendency towards falling into it anyway. 

Long ago, before the world ended, it was just the way you would prune your list of acquaintances to the whims of your depression. What was the point of meeting people, or building friendships, if in your next bout of depression you would drive them away? Why deceive someone into being your friend on one of your good days, when you knew your bad days were much more frequent? 

So it was the Lonely that had you in its grips, whispering soft reassurances that all you believed of yourself at your worst was completely true.

Now, afterwards, after the-- the undoing, the disappearance of all those fears, still you find yourself falling into old habits. Nobody has the patience and the emotional wherewithal they once did, so if you feel that you impose on people with your presence, take up affection that is better spent elsewhere, those are merely thoughts you've always had.

But it is easier, you find, to know that there is someone who will always be around no matter how little you feel like interacting with them. When you are tired again, so tired that you feel the ache of the Lonely in your bones the way old people feel the incoming rain in their creaky joints, there is no judgment and no expectation from the housemate under your floorboards. They do not see you in your sweatpants and three-weeks-unwashed t-shirt, shuffling towards the kitchen to eat rice cakes over the sink. They do not expect a text that you have no energy for, they do not tell you you should shower.

Instead, you have this small exchange: _knock knock. Thump thump. Someone is here. You are never truly alone._

And that, for all its oddness, helps you feel normal.

You do not think too hard about what your housemate under the floorboards gets out of this arrangement, or whether they may want to leave. It never sounds like they are trying to escape, and the shuffling moves from place to place, like they have just as much a routine and a circuit underneath the floor as you have above it. When you are feeling well enough to slip into your routine, you know where to step lighter because your paths intersect: standing slightly to the right of the microwave as you wait for your food to heat up, or taking care not to scrape your chair when you get up.

They could leave if they wanted to, you think. You are pretty sure. Maybe sometimes they do, judging by the disturbed earth you find along the back of the house. Or maybe those are just their occasional guests.

But it is an easy thing, to exist in the same space like this; to be reminded you are not alone.

So, one day, when the rain is falling in heavy sheets, a constant static of white noise as it pelts against the roof, and you hear crying from under the floorboards--the quiet, anguished weeping of long-held pain--it feels only natural that you lie down on the floor, and press your cheek to the ground.

"Hello?" you say to the floorboards, and there is a hitch to the sobs, a sharp inhalation and a held breath. Maybe they don't know you're talking to them. How could they, when they cannot see you? So you ask: "Are you alright down there?"

You don't fully understand the words that follow, muffled by the floorboards and warbling with tears, but you understand enough. 

Achingly, inch by inch, you can pull one another through.


End file.
